Top 5 Analytics trends in Fashion Retail

Technology has enriched the overall customer experience. As a result, today’s leading fashion houses are looking at several ways to utilize emerging analytical technologies in fashion retail today.

Let’s look at some of the ways this is happening today.

Digital Marketing and Social Media Analytics

Digital marketing analytics expenses increased by 60% in 2015 as branding and advertising businesses boomed. Social media and online advertising on mobile will continue to grow as integration of offline and online customer experience is on the rise. This in turn, has increased consumer brands’ ability to digitally influence customers and digitally empowered customers’ ability to influence brand image and value.

Cross-selling and upselling through Personalization

Owing to advancements in technology combined with the avalanche of data available today, enterprises across industries are leveraging inexpensive technologies such as Hadoop to analyze huge amounts of customer data, understand patterns and subsequently personalize their offers to their customers. This in turn helps them out-think and out-do the competition. “More data storytelling equals more engagement”.

A leading Indian retailer boosted category growth by 50% with tailored campaigns based on affinity analysis, cross promotion between categories like kids, baby world and toys.

Strategic customer segmentation enabled the business to drive a consistent marketing strategy across all concepts. Customer acquisition, retention campaigns and maximization strategies enabled increase in customer engagement and loyalty. By understanding customer attitudes, their purchase behavior and identifying fashion trends, they make smarter marketing decisions.

Analytics is helping retailers aggregate fashion trends and sales information from a wide variety of sources around the globe—from retail sites, social media, designer runway reports, and blogs covering trends—and making it accessible in real time – across menswear, women’s wear, children’s apparel, accessories, and beauty.

In addition to the ability to combine both internal and external data sources, users now have access to more context for their data, which ultimately leads to more insights and better decisions.

Managing seasonal fluctuations

Fashion retailers often struggle to quickly address seasonal fluctuations and capitalize on unexpected opportunities. A lot of competitive advantage is to be gained in innovations that help retailers get the best bang for their buck, while maintaining customer loyalty.

With the right real-time insights, retailers can shorten seasonal cycles to meet changing customer preferences. This in turn, can help negate surprises in customer demand and minimize losses.

By using analytics, fashion retailers can have more flexibility in their supply chain responsiveness. Greater precision with in-season control can also be enabled by using modern analytics solutions to derive insights and optimize the 5Ps – product, promotion, pricing, placement, and people.

IoT devices in the fitness segment

While health and wellness have always been popular, it has become a trendy lifestyle choice for many over the past few years, driven by wearable technology.

Smart technology is embedded into clothing, sportswear shoes, and trackers. The large amount of information obtained from these connected sensors when combined with contextual data can result in highly useful and interesting insights for consumers.

Tracking the number of steps taken each day and heart rate, monitoring blood glucose levels, telemetry, and weight are just a few examples of data that consumers can obtain from their wearable devices. Consumers have started responding to such performance feedback and analytics from wearable fitness devices, if that’ll help them lead an active and healthy lifestyle. By using beacons and real-time analytics, retailers can create innovative engagement campaigns to further enhance the lifestyle choices that their consumers make, boosting loyalty as a result.

As a marketer, I’ve keenly watched the retail and consumer trends for a couple decades. But never has it been more exciting than now. Because everything we used to know about shopping is changing, and fast. As consumers, it’s great to be at the center of this technology-led evolution, because it’s unfolding in our everyday lives. I’m happy to share my views on related trends and issues. You’ll see me writing on the digitally empowered consumer, shopper behavior and marketing, consumerization of retail, internet of things, analytics technologies, cloud computing and digital marketing.

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